Over forty years
ago I was looking through the cheap paperbacks and other publications in a seedy
backstreet bookshop and came across a copy of Swank, an American men's
magazine as they used to be called. Some people used the term girlie magazine,
but in those days of censorship you didn't get to see too much of the girls and
the magazines filled their pages with all sorts of material, including articles
and stories by well-known writers. Swank even let Seymour Krim, a lively
New York critic and essayist, edit several sections of poetry and prose of the
kind that would normally be in literary journals. And it was in Swank
that I read an article by Elmer Grossberg that intrigued me. It was a reflection
on returning to America after more than seven years in Europe to find that
things had changed beyond recognition and that there didn't seem to be a place
for the outsider. And Grossberg clearly thought that was what he had become.

I liked
Veterans Without Administration. It was honest and had a slightly bemused
air and it said a great deal in a short space about someone who had grown up
during the Depression, been conscripted in the 1940s, became an expatriate after
that, and hadn't realised how the affluence of the 1950s had affected his
homeland. As it said: "The philistine had snapped up culture as her new fetish.
A pagan at heart this was her latest adornment, her most recent golden calf of
pleasure. It went well with glittering cars, TV and Hi-Fi sets, framed prints,
wall-to-wall bookshelves. And all for pleasure. What art did not transmit easily
and comfortably through lulled senses was repudiated, unless, like Picasso and
Bartok and James Joyce, it was fashionable." And for a man who had scuffled and
lived the bohemian life in Paris and elsewhere, it was strange to find that "the
artist had prospered and was now respectable." There were great opportunities,
if the artist could "tailor himself to suit them", and "foundations, grants,
fellowships", if you knew how to cultivate those in control.

A brief note with
Grossberg's article said that he'd published his first and only novel,
Farewell, My Son, in 1946 ( the issue of Swank was dated May 1961),
and I made a mental note of the title and over the years kept an eye out for it
as I disturbed the dust in second-hand bookshops. I didn't find the book but I
did come across a copy of Reginald Moore's splendid Modern Reading,
published in 1944, and it included a story by Grossberg. Black Boy's Good
Time was a brutal tale of a young Negro who is accused of stealing a car,
beaten up in the cells, and then released when the police catch the real thief.
The sheriff warns the boy not to say anything about what happened to him and
then treats him to an ice-cream and a free visit to the cinema. That's the good
time referred to in the title.

Another find in a
second-hand bookshop, an American edition of the O’Henry Memorial Award Prize
Stories of 1943, had the same story and with it a note saying that it had
originally been published in Esquire. It also said Grossberg had been
born in New York in 1925, that his father had died when Grossberg was eight, and
that he was a student at Brooklyn College. His favourite writers were John
Steinbeck, William Saroyan and Sholem Aleichem.

The trail went
cold after that, though I have to admit I didn't follow it too intently. I still
looked for Farewell, My Son in London and Glasgow and Jersey and anywhere
else I happened to be, but it didn't seem important to pay the kind of prices
that book-search specialists charged. I've always had the feeling that books are
often best appreciated when they're discovered in a place where you didn't
expect to find them. I never thought I'd come across Speed The Plough, a
1923 collection of short stories by Mary Butts, on a barrow bookstall in a
side-street in Liverpool, nor a copy of Albert Halper's The Chute on a
shelf in a shop in Stockport, and Granville Hicks' Only One Storm in an
arcade in Cardiff. But I did and I expected that Elmer Grossberg's novel would
turn up somewhere along the line.

It never did
though, until the days of the Internet dawned and a friend told me with an
excited gleam in his eye that just about everything was now available. All you
had to do was tap in a few details and booksellers all over the world would
respond with offers of any book you wanted. No more kneeling in corners hunting
through piles of grubby novels, no more straining to see what the faded titles
on the top shelf are. And the friend did tap in the details and got me a copy of
Farewell, My Son. "It was easy," he said, and the old Puritan in me
wondered whether things that come easily are always properly appreciated. "Ah,"
my friend scoffed, "you're still hooked on the romance of hunting for books in
unusual places. You can still have that by contacting booksellers in Canada or
Australia or Finland." All I could think was that I'd like to actually go to
those bookshops to see what I could find by chance. But it seemed churlish to
tell my friend that. He also told me it was possible I'd be able to find out
more about Elmer Grossberg through the Internet. But I wasn't sure I wanted to
know more about him, apart from perhaps finding out if he'd published any other
novels. And even that was just curiosity rather than a desire to read them. I've
never been addicted to the idea of knowing everything about a writer or even
reading everything they wrote. But, for the record, a few taps on the keyboard
and nothing else came up other than a book about Castro and Cuba that Grossberg
seems to have co-authored in 1961. And that didn't interest me.

Was Farewell,
My Son worth waiting forty or so years to read? I think so, though it isn't
a masterpiece. It's very much of its time, the late-1930s and early-1940s, and
uses an open, emotive style to tell its story. And the story is important, just
as stories were important to Steinbeck and Saroyan and other novelists of the
period. I'd guess there's an autobiographical element in it, which isn't
surprising for a young writer's first novel, and it's about growing up in New
York in a fatherless family which is befriended by a strange old man, Polk, who
encourages Rudy, the young son, to develop his interest in playing -the piano
and extending his outlook beyond the immediate. Polk is often ridiculed by
members of the family for his pretensions but Rudy humours him and eventually
finds out about the real Polk behind the shabbiness and failed attempts at
sophistication. Folk's story is that of the immigrant arriving in America to
find it's not the land of milk and honey and jobs aren't easy to come by. Rich
men have the police on their side and poor men fight each other for work. Polk
gets involved in strikes and demonstrations and is in and out of prison. And he
joins the Communist Party. He's a front-line activist and in the Party from its
early days, but as it grows in size and influence the middle-class members take
over and make all the decisions. Polk realises he's thought of as expendable and
good only for contributing money or standing on picket lines. And he notes the
rise in personal animosities between Party members and the increase in factional
fighting as the intellectuals move in. One wonders whether or not Grossberg had
some sort of involvement with the Communist Party when he was young ? His novel
does paint a vivid picture of aspects of radical history.

There is an
emotional drive to Farewell, My Son which is, as I mentioned earlier,
very much of its time. And I was reminded of almost-forgotten writers like
Pietro di Donate (Christ in Concrete, 1939) and Michael De Capite (No
Bright Banner, 1944) who weren't afraid to wear their hearts on their
sleeves, I doubt they're much read these days and would be seen as
unsophisticated both for what they wrote and how they wrote about it. But I
suppose they thought there was a world to win and how many people think that way
now?

So, here I am, and
on the desk is a copy of Farewell, My Son, together with Modern
Reading, the O’Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1943, and the
Swank that started it all off. All of them a bit worn and frayed at the
edges and the pulp paper that Swank was printed on cracks and crumbles as the
years pass. But there is something reassuring about old books and magazines.
They show that the past survives, especially in an age when a kind of wilful
amnesia seems to be the norm. And what I have here is virtually all I know about
Elmer Grossberg and really all I want know. A novel, a short story and an
article. At the end of the day the work is all a writer needs to be remembered
by.